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"My last flight starts here ..."

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I've always wanted to create my own cartoon. It was an agitating, intolerable desire that sat inside and flared up again and again after it was almost crushed by doubts about the possibility of this idea, technical difficulties, lack of experience and knowledge, and so on. I'm still not sure if I can do it - but the more I think about it, the more I realize that I will finish this project one way or another. I will carry it through the years, change it as much as I need, suffer it from beginning to end - but finish. Because this is my story.

I have always been madly in love with space fiction. Books by Asimov, Harrison, Kuttner, Bester and others, including Lovecraft and Wells, influenced me a lot as a teenager. Not to mention films, games and music, one way or another related to the topic of space exploration, collision with the unknown and new discoveries about the world, around and within us. Space … the scale of atomic and stellar systems, emptiness and orderliness, fractality and infinity of the observable Universe, limited by the very nature of space-time - when you think about it and try to figure it out at least a little, it takes your breath away no less than from the old fantastic adventure books. And I want to share this feeling.

They say that a writer writes a book that he would like to read himself, which would leave him in awe. What story do I want to share with this cartoon? A genre movie, deliberately simplistic and effective at the same time … will there not be too much "Hollywood" in it and its history? I dont know. Five years have passed, and in 2018 I only have a script, a few rough sketches, a debut comic strip written from a draft script, and a burning, with a bitter aftertaste, desire to make my own big, atmospheric cartoon that looks and feels like big and adult cinema with a huge budget and top actors. Will I be able to, will I succeed? Will I pull one out - if not, can I find a team? Funds to make your dreams come true? Do I have enough leadership skills to do this?

I don’t know, I don’t know anything.

Besides the fact that my spacesuit is almost out of oxygen and I'm fucking getting to the Apollo lander to leave the moon and return to Earth.

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Old (2013) sketches of character designs and their deformations / damage, conveying the atmosphere of the project.

Left to right and top to bottom: General design of the appearance of spacesuits as they become infected with a parasitic lifeform (far right is an approximate view of the antagonist in the climax scene).

Sketches of the appearance of the characters.

Зараженный космонавт (Глина)
Clay figurine of one of the main characters, study of damage.

Монстр (Набросок)
Sketch of the appearance of one of the characters, acrylic paints.

Early renders of the lunar spacesuit and the appearance of the protagonist, astronaut Anthony Howell (inspired by the appearance of American actor Brian Cranston (Breaking Bad).

Космонавт на Луне (Набросок)
Astronaut on the Moon (sketch, 2018).